Twitter Updates

Desert Island Discs is one of my favourite BBC Radio 4 programmes. Like an awful lot of the Radio 4 schedule, it's been there for ever. Like over sixty years. There's a story that Herbert Morrison, 1940s Labour cabinet minister and leader of the old London County Council so longed to be chosen to appear on it that he used to carry around a list of the eight records he'd selected, just in case he got the call. He never did.

Well, yes, I'd love to be on Desert Island Discs, and I think I could put together an interesting eight track playlist. But I haven't got a pre-selected list I carry around with me. If I wanted to, I could do a Desert Island Discs blog post anyway. It would mean that I'd never get invited, but that's the way it is, anyway. With an iphone with over 900 tracks on it, the whole concept looks a bit absurd.

Then of course, the real reason is the vanity one, the lure of being selected.

So I'll readily own up to my own vanity and say how pleased and flattered I am to have been asked by Norm to be the subject of a normblog profile. Blogging royalty. In a pantheon which includes international star bloggers like Glenn Reynolds, Omar of Iraq the Model and Michele Malkin. And a great many of my own favourites. The thing is, Norm's now up to number 252 . OK, he doesn't do them in rank order, as far as I know, but maybe he's down to scraping the barrel?

So Norm sends me this proforma to fill in for the profile. Consternation. There are fifty questions to answer, and I have to choose just thirty. As you'll see from my archive, I tend never to use one sentence where fourteen will do, so how am I going to work out which ones I can bear to leave out?

Would I prefer to tell the world which political or philosphical thesis I think it more important to promote, or would it be better to reveal what I'd do with a huge amount of money if it came my way? Believe me, the choices weren't easy.

And then, I really like putting links into my posts. It's a sort of extreme pedantry. There are no links in normblog profiles, yet here I was going to identify so many ideas and references to things I'd really like to share with people. I emailed Norm. Could I just put links in? No. But if I supplied the links separately from the draft, he'd try put them in for me. When I sent him my draft, there was a list of about fifty links. Norm's tone was slightly pained, but tolerant. There were an awful lot of links; normblog profiles don't usually have links, and would I mind if he made decisions about which if any to put in? No, of course I'd be happy to leave it to him.

So that's what he's done, being a very excellent mensch, as well as an ace blogger.

Thanks, Norm. And thanks for unwittingly giving me the idea of doing a post in which I include the answers to the rest of the fifty questions that didn't go into the profile, updating it to add a few at a time over the course of the day.

Which is almost certainly more than you want to know. But here's the information if you care to read it.

What has been your worst blogging experience?

Being threatened with being sued by a writer who didn't like what I'd written in relation to a comment she wrote on my blog, and then deluged with emails from her friends and allies who piled on the pressure and some of whom organized various forms of ostracism. I didn't back down, she didn't sue and the whole thing petered out but left me feeling resentful and indignant.

What philosophical thesis
do you think it most important to disseminate?

The idea that groups of ordinary people can organize and achieve enormously beneficial changes, even if they don't belong to a political party. The history of zionism, of the Soviet Jewry campaign, and the various movements that led to the downfall of Soviet Communism are cases that come to mind.

Do you think the world (human civilization) has already
passed its best point, or is that yet to come?

The best is definitely yet to come. That's Jewish optimism for you. I think the problems of global warming will be solved, and the forms of terrorism that blight our world today will be eliminated by changes in technology. I realise this is very much a minority opinion.

I'm still thinking about who might be cultural heroes for me. And then I've run out of time for the moment. I'll be back to do some more later today.

Mmmm. I'm prejudiced against pretty much any variant of English blokeishness, especially the shouty outdoor drinking, upperclass braying and football fan types, but ditto for macho cultural wannabees of every nation.

So I'm now thinking about:

If you could choose anyone, from any walk of life, to be
Prime Minister (President etc), who would you choose?

Given the present incumbent, tempting to say almost anyone, but it's not quite true. The obvious choice is Tony Blair. I liked Lord Desai's comment that Gordon Brown was put on earth to show how good Tony Blair really was.

What is your favourite
proverb?

Many waters cannot quench love

What, if anything, do you worry about?

Like Imshin said, if you're a Jewish mother, you worry about just about everything. On a personal basis, how to provide for an old age which could well include years of dementia; on my daughter and son in law's behalf, what will they live on, and how will they be able to afford a house; in the wider world, how will we be able to keep the rogue states and terrorist groups from blighting our lives and theirs before we find the technologies that will totter them.

If you were to relive your life to this point, is there
anything you'd do differently?

I can think of some people I should have walked right by.

What would you call your autobiography?

Getting the Lightbulb to Want to Change

Who would play you in the movie about your life?

Imshin wrote after she met me that I reminded her of Judy Davis. I don't look like her, but I'm flattered by the comparison, so I'll opt for her.

What is your most treasured possession?

My grandmother's brass candlesticks and my grandmother's silver betrothal spoon, both of which came from Galicia in Poland

What talent would you most like to have?

I'd love to be a brilliant street dancer

Which English Premiership football (soccer) team do you
support (or which baseball and/or basketball team)?

See my comments above on commonly enjoyed activities which I regard as a waste of time.

If you could have one (more or less realistic) wish come
true, what would you wish for?

To be able to give up paid working and devote my energies to all the other things I don't get enough time for

How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly
to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money?

Firstly, set up a charitable fund of ten percent of it, and devote a part of my life to using the income anonymously to help individuals and causes I like. Secondly, buy my daughter and son in law a fabulous home and everything needed to make it into whatever kind of place they dream of. Thirdly, use the opportunities to travel to spend time with family and friends across the world, plus attend some fancy workshops run by top people in their trade--like Linda Weinman's Photoshop and Susie Fishbein's cookery workshop. Fourthly, sponsor groups of young Jewish families to get housing near synagogues so they could become long term communities. Finally I think I'd get plastic surgery to do some pin and tuck work on the saggy bits that you get when you're my age.

Over on Harry's Place, David T is looking at what he thinks is a current fashion statement: the wearing of keffiyehs by hip young women with attitude. He asks what the significance is, whilst suggesting this fashionista-oriented and this Guardianista-oriented explanation.

I could say that even a cool man like David T is still going to be a bit slow on the uptake about noticing something that's been around for years, but I have a personal stake in the history of this trend, and it turns out to be particularly relevant to a current area of sound and fury.

Another reason why I stopped wearing them was I got into being a radical Jewish feminist around that time, or maybe a couple of years earlier.

Socialist Jewish feminists went on wearing them. It was a badge of being that sort of Jewish feminist. It meant that yes, you were a feminist, but the "supreme struggles" were ultimately "liberation struggles", supporting people like George Habash, and Robert Mugabe.

I remember having tea in a very elegant flat near Regent's Park one summer afternoon around 1979, whilst a fellow collective member talked about her ongoing telephone conversations with members of the RAF (no, not the chaps who flew British planes) as she put some superb Schubert piano sonatas on the hi-fi.

Radical Jewish feminists ditched being pressurised into being demonstration fodder for left-wing defined moral imperatives, especially around the prescribed stance to be anti-zionist and in favour of a "popular secular democratic state" led by Yasser Arafat and the PLO----so really, it was the supremely ironic "Independent" Jewish Voices scenario 25 years before this latest relaunch.

And what do you know, an awful lot of the socialist Jewish feminist women I knew then (though not the woman with the flat near Regent's Park) are signatories to IJV now. Or should I say, all the ones that belonged to or were fellow travellers of the CP have signed up to IJV, whereas the serious hard Trotskyists of those days are with Steven Rose of Bricup and Co. sharing a bed with the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK at the latest relaunch of an anti-zionist umbrella group, "Enough!". What's more, I can't see any significant alteration in their positions then or now. And I should stress that I think the IJV types I know are now much too beyond low level signification gestures like wearing real live keffiyehs.

I have an extended post on the IJV phenomenon that I've been picking away at for around a week, but I don't have the time for the headbanging involved. I hope to return to it later this week.

She's a really bright, lively young woman, and I very much enjoy talking to her.

She comes from a family of stellar religious ancestry, from rabbis who are so famous that they are just known by the names of the books they are most famous for. It's rather as if we spoke of Jane Austen as The Pride and Prejudice or George Eliot as The Mill on the Floss.

So she looks me straight in the eyes and says, I really can't stand gays.

Well, how do you know who they are? I say. For a start, the Jewish tradition doesn't regard gays as a separate category of people. The Torah forbids particular sexual acts, of which male homosexual acts are one. That doesn't include sexual acts between women, which are not forbidden, but regarded as lasciviousness. So do you include men who do one homosexual act as gays who you can't stand? Or is there a required quantity to qualify? And how about women who pursue this particular form of lasciviousness? Do they count for being hated, or is it just men?

I can't remember the rest of the conversation.

She's a really bright, lively young woman, and I very much enjoy talking to her.

She's very widely travelled, with a huge range of friends. That's not surprising, because she's very good company. She's much in demand in the sophisticated city centre setting you're most likely to run across her in. When she's not off jet setting, or pursuing her high profile job.

Discussing the arguments that have been going on in Israel over the last months about the role of the settlers in the recent disengagement in Gaza, she tells me she resents religious people who try to impose their lifestyles on others or claim that they have a key to heaven.

Well, how do you know who they are? I say. I mean, there were about 8,000 settlers in the Gaza settlements, and how do you know they were all out to impose their lifestyles on others and claim they have a key to heaven? How can you tell if demonstrating on a particular issue means they want to impose a whole lifestyle on you? What about the fact that your lifestyle is the dominant one in every western country, and some religious people feel resentful at what they see as having western secularism, in the form of displays of exposed flesh, and 24-hour materialism, imposed on them? Umm, don't you think the liberal left elites of most western countries think they have the key to heaven on earth?

We haven't so far found time to pursue this conversation.

UPDATE

Today, I find on the web site of one of an outstanding Israeli poet and blogger, a woman I've never met, but whose poetry and writings I admire immensely, this self aware but ultimately appalling statement:

The mess in Hebron is making me generalize into a dislike for the very religious. Today I found myself in Bnai Brak, standing next to two young women who were speaking Yiddish. It was a very dirty, ugly Yiddish, and seemed to me almost a purposeful slurring and distortion of that accurate and lovely language of feelings. All my anger against the fanaticization of Israel focused on the language of these two young housewives, and I controlled myself with great difficulty.

I resisted the temptation to rewrite the statement substituting the word "Jews" for "very religious". I'm a Yiddish fan too. Somehow, I doubt if I would have found their Yiddish dirty and ugly. I've never found any Yiddish I've heard dirty and ugly.

In the heart of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, a young yeshivah (Talmudic college) student has started an open air fast food business making and selling latkes. He's trying to raise money to pay towards his wedding, this summer. Now let's see. The profit on each latke sold is....ummm, maybe four shekels (50p). So to pay for a wedding, you'd have to sell..... (suggestions, please, in the comments).

One of his business partners has taken a break from the business of mixing the latke mixture and frying. He's trying out the time honoured Jewish role of shlepping-- bringing in the customers. A close mutual friend's at the front of the shot, her expression showing her own take on this lively business venture.

UPDATE: The latke selling venture had to close with the end of Chanukah. But it ended up making 3,000 shekels profit. That's over four hundred pounds. Amazing. On the strength of it, the young man who was looking to finance his wedding proposed to his girlfriend. And was accepted.

One reason why I'm so sympathetic to all this Elvis-is-alive stuff is that it represents a modern version of a recurrent folktale motif: that of the King in the Mountain who will return to save his people. So in folk literature, that's Kings like King Arthur. And of course there are links to the Christian story of Jesus and the core orthodox Jewish belief in the coming of the Messiah. Myths after all are versions of realities, and which you think is the reality will depend on what your core beliefs are. Or think they are.

When I was a full time teacher trainer, I used to love doing one of the major teaching events of each year, which was teaching large year groups how to tell stories to children, instead of reading them out of books. The students always wanted the prop of the book, and felt it made them better story-presenters. But then we would get groups to do comparative ratings of other students telling and reading the same story. And they always preferred the tellings. Because eye contact and the animation of a face telling a story have a magic which has and will always draw listeners of any age in. And you don't establish that relationship with an audience if you're reading out of a book.

So then,we used to introduce them to the research on folk tale motifs, and show how you could learn and memorise a quite elaborate story from just a skeleton of the main events, and you could then perform it. And in the end, they would find the kids in the classes they taught begging for that storyout of your head.

But that was all a long time ago. I did use the technique to help my daughter do an oral batmitzvah torah discussion (the sedrah, or Torah reading, was Shemos) when she was twelve. She talked about the Almighty choosing Moses as the Messenger, who really didn't want to be chosen, and completely lacked self confidence.

It was quite a struggle, because she really wanted to do a discussion which had been previously written out in full, and read it off the page. There were tears throughout the preparation stage, about which I felt very guilty. But she got there in the end, and did a marvellous and touching presentation, which I still remember with a little pang in my heart. And people kept talking to me for years afterwards about how lovely it was that she spoke from the heart, instead of reading off a page.

So it was really weird when I woke up this morning, switched the radio on as usual and heard the Radio 4 sports round-up commentator saying, and Yasser Arafat will be the seam bowler for....

It was a Friday, well into September, but still high summer in this exceptionally warm year.

On that day, I had to pick up my mother's old car that had failed its MOT test from the garage that had failed it. I had to get it to a scrapper's yard. Then I had to get over to Stoke Newington, half way across London, where the replacement car I'd bought was waiting to be picked up. I had to get that car across the centre of London over to my mother's flat in Maida Vale. And then I had to get back home in time to make everything ready for Erev Shabbos.

It didn't look good. It started off when I tried ringing the scrapper's yard I'd taken my mother's last clapped out car to. I was already late getting the day started. No answer. I tried two more around my local area. No answer. In the end, I located a place that was open in Borehamwood. It was fourteen miles away.

So I got to the scrapper's yard which was, as they usually are, in the middle of nowhere, along with six or seven other scrapper's yards. Instead of the usual macho looking three-day stubble types who usually run such places, the one I'd found was run by a couple of guys who I thought were Kenyan Asians. Their place was immaculate and their style courteous. They did the business quickly and efficiently.

Umm, can you tell me where the nearest public transport is, I said. Because I have to get to Stoke Newington. So I would like to get to the local rail network.

Oh, there's a bus stop just half a mile away, the boss said. Justup the road. Listen, he'll take you.

"He" was a huge well built man standing at the back of the office. We walked out towards his car.

Are you sure about this, I said. I really don't want to bother you.

He smiled, and we got in his car. I was preoccupied with mentally sorting out the complicated route I'd have to take. But he wanted to talk.

Beautiful weather, he said. Yes, I answered, and got back into route planning.

He was having none of it. Are you following the cricket, he asked.

Now, this was the biggest cricketing day of the year. It was the last day of the fifth test match. It was a whole big deal. Because nobody could tell who was going to win and the winner would get the Ashes.

The man laughed. Are you from north London, he asked. I like to think I can tell where people come from, even though I didn't come from this country. I told him I thought his English was really good if he could tell a north London accent, because I don't think mine is at all strong. He asked my name, and I told him, Judy.

If you regularly read my blog, you'll be aware that I have lots of opinions, many of them strongly held.And I don't hestitate to give them. So you might be surprised to know that though I'm usually fairly articulate in person, there are often times when I'm quite...reserved. You could call it emotional insecurity. So I didn't ask him his name. Because I was, well....reserved.

He began to tell me where he came from. It was Islamabad, he said. But he had been in this country many years. He told me he'd been a teacher in Islamabad, and had tried to teach in this country, but hated it. I asked him if that was because of the difference between the discipline in schools in this country and Pakistan, and he said it was.

I told him a little about my work as a school inspector. About my experience of visiting an Islamic school, which I had liked. I talked about the fact that I'd done a lot of work with Jewish schools, and how there were quite a lot of similarities between the two types of school. And I explained about how the system was loaded against setting up Islamic state schools and how unfair this was.

And all this time, I wondered if he did realise I was Jewish. He hadn't said he was a Muslim. And somehow I wasn't able to be explicit about being Jewish. I was, well....reserved.

And he told me about his worries about his mother, who has cancer. He said he was been trying to get her into this country so he can look after her. He was finding the authorities make it very difficult. And I said that, yes, the immigration authorities seem to make it very difficult, particularly for people from India and Pakistan. But I didn't tell him about my own parents' difficulties in getting into the UK. Or about the fact that my father wasn't allowed to work for nearly two years after he got here. Or about the Home Office immigration file on my father that I'd seen just two weeks earlier which had comments scribbled on it like "Are these aliens married yet?" and "When can we get these aliens to leave the country?". Because I was, well....reserved.

And then I noticed that this car ride, which should have been about half a mile, was going on and on. Wewere riding deep into open countryside, miles from anywhere. He just kept on driving. I realised that no-one knew where we were, and no-one who knew me knew remotely where I was. And he was a very big, powerfully built man. I'd been mugged the previous December. The man who mugged me was well spoken and very neatly dressed. You'd never have taken him for a mugger. But I didn't ask now where we were going. Because I was, well....reserved.

Then just as I was going through my mental repertoire of horror stories about women in mini-cabs who were murdered or raped by their drivers, he said, you're trying to get to the rail network. So if I take you to Watford, you'll have a really good choice of services.

But, I said, that's really a long way out of your way. I can get the bus, it's no problem. He smiled again and said he really wanted to take me. And I thanked him profuselyand we talked about different routes I might take.

Then when we got to Watford Station, he carefully drove round so he could deposit me just outside the entrance. I said to him, you've saved me hours of travel. I am so grateful. You really have made my day much easier. I am so pleased to have met you, and I've enjoyed talking to you so much.

For once, I overcame my reserve and I made myself ask his name.

I'm Sayeed, he said. I've enjoyed meeting you. And I said, Sayeed, I hope you manage to bring your mother in. I hope you and your family enjoy everything good in life.

He reached out his hand to shake mine. And I was too reserved to say that actually, I prefer not to have physical contact with men because I am a practising orthodox Jew. I have the same difficulty in saying that to the men in synagogue who always want to shake my hand and sometimes even give me a pat on the shoulder or a hug. Because I'm, well...reserved. So I shook his hand and said, thank you so much Sayeed. I hope you and your family have a good weekend.

But I was still... reserved, and I didn't say what I really wanted to say. Which was

Thank you, Sayeed, for making me talk to you. And thank you for showing what it means to act in the divine image in your dealings with your fellow human beings.

Sometimes you can be so surprised by the unexpected links you make with people.

I always keep an eye on normblog and long before I started my own blog, I would often exchange email comments with Norm on his posts. I sort of thought of him as a friend, and it was even nicer to find he thought that way of me too. Obviously we have a great deal in common, amongst which is our shared age group, which means we experienced the zeitgeist in more or less the same way. We have quite a lot of political common ground-- and almost as many differences too. Like, I regard myself as totally cured of marxism, but Norm (as far as I know) remains committed to his version of it.

Then there's religion, with Norm a committed atheist and me? Well, if you're a normal left wing type, you might regard me as a raving fundamentalist nut. Or if you're from a particular strand of strict orthodox Jewish practice, you might regard me as not quite .... Anyway, you can form your own opinion of my religious orthodoxy by reading my posts on Jewish life and learning.

Then there's the small matter of cricket. I wrote the odd chutzpadik email to Norm about his love of cricket because I couldn't resist pointing out that every Jewish man I ever met from South Africa or Zimbabwe is besotted with cricket. This is not matched by the Jews of other former British colonies. On the whole, British, Australian and Indian Jewish men I know do not share this intense interest in cricket, despite it being an important national game.

I have a theory that the reason for this is that being into cricket was the only way they could reconcile the combination of anti-semitism in the imitation English public schools they went to with their ambiguous status as whites. This is because as Jews with a very strong tradition of being conscious of slavery and freedom, they were also spiritually and emotionally kindred to the black people who were their servants.

For the boys in the context of those schools, being brainy was no way to win status. Normal athletics was something few Jews ever shone at. But cricket seems not to demand the same level of athleticism, so that many South African Jewish men I know of did bat in their school teams. And becoming a cricket maven and a total fan seems to have done the trick too.

Norm was having none of this analysis, and was polite but clearly impatient. I gathered he saw this as crude reductionism. But despite these differences, we've come to an accommodation around it. Why, I even wrote him an erudite footnote on the subject of his application of the Theses of Feuerbach to select an ideal all-time cricket team, in which I pointed out he had ignored both the luminary Marxist revolutionary-cum-cricket writer , C L R James and the immortal cricketing hero W G Grace. He graciously commended my diligent homework and tactfully refrained from answering my question about which he thought I knew less about, marxism or cricket.

So I was very struck by Norm having put up a post over Rosh Hashona, the Jewish new year, about a dream, and that he asked for people to try to explain how one can know one is dreaming inside a dream. I've not known Norm write about dreams before, though he tends to choose any subject that catches his fancy. Now the really strange thing was this: the very day he was writing his post, amongst the prayers I would have been saying is this one, which you are supposed to read in an undertone during the eerie and awe-inspiring cohanic blessing.

Master of the World, I am Yours and my dreams are Yours. I have dreamed a dream but I do not know what it means. May it be Your Will.....that all my dreams regarding myself and regarding all of Israel be good ones--those I have dreamed about myself, those I have dreamed about others, and those that others have dreamed about me. If they are good, strengthen them, fortify them, make them endure in me and in them like the dreams of the righteous Joseph. But if they require healing, heal them......

It was interesting that of the posts which Norm got back in response to his request, there was one which I thought was extraordinarily insightful, from a reader in Minnesota. This reader thought Norm's dream, about a mislaid phone, was about his inner anxieties as a blogger, at living up to the expectations his thousands of readers have of him. When we exchanged emails about my link with the prayer, Norm wondered how the reader had focused on that anxiety, rather than one about family or friends. How could anyone know?

Having been in touch with bloggers who have recently signed off from blogging, like Harry and Imshin, I have a very clear sense of how oppressive the expectations of others can seem, especially if you have a big international reputation, but your own situation and concerns are changing. And to each of them, I've tried to say that nothing can take away the quality of what they've done. But sometimes, you just need a break.

So today, I got another surprise about Norm's posts chiming with some of my more idiosyncratic concerns when he linked up to a series of photos from somewhere in China I'd never previously heard of called Wenxue City in Guangzhou.

China's been on my mind for various reasons including the comparisons in my mind lately between different societies which appear to be open to variants on capitalism and democracy, but are actually controlled by or contested by totalitarian parties and "liberation movements". And I was yesterday in a long cafe conversation about the high days of my involvement with marxism in the late 70s and very early 80s. That was because I knew lots of the old marxist lags of those days who are these days leading the various movements to boycott Israel and Build Solidarity with the Palestinians. Those were the days when the Cultural Revolution was still seen as some sort of Woodstock on speed, culturally exciting and even glamorous. I even had a little Mao-style jacket myself. More fashion statement than true allegiance. I never joined any of the parties (political or otherwise).

Norm doesn't provide any view on what the photos show, but they fascinate me, because they do show what looks like some sort of capitalist society-- VWs, Japanese trucks, brand names, and people dressed in western styles. The most fashionable of all is a young woman actually throwing herself in front of a truck to commit suicide in her despair over her boyfriend problems. (Don't do it, sweetie, he's not worth it. No one's worth that.) But look at those four inch heeled gold shoes. She certainly dressed carefully for her attempt. At least, I hope it was no more than an attempt.

Then the rest of the photos show us a what looks like a very unhappy society, almost the war of all against all. We have people trying to steal railway lines, prospect for buried metal on a landfill site, make off with dumped condemned food, and indulging in high level road rage. Most strikingly, two people, a man and a woman, are using bridges not to cross over or get to somewhere, but to draw attention to their misery by threatening suicide.

The picture of me that's at the top of my blog is me standing on a very striking little bridge in Paddington Basin, which I had to cross in August every time I visited my mother when she was in hospital. When my daughter was feeling a bit down about my mother's state, I suggested she bring her camera and she could do some photographs. We had such fun doing that that most of the time one or other of us was falling about laughing, and it took the tension out of the hospital visit.

The next day, I visited in the evening. I crossed the bridge to go home quite late at night. There was a beautiful moon up, and the moonlight in the water and across the buildings was magical. I noticed a little woman from south-east Asia walking behind me, wearing the uniform of a hospital orderly. Isn't it beautiful, she said. And I smiled warmly and said, yes, it really is. And I thought then how touching it was that she had, despite what must have been a very tiring day, reached out to talk to a stranger and share some warmth on that bridge. And--there you go-- I had written this when I saw that Norm just happens to have a post up on Bridges. Which in his case is on some efforts at making bridges between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

So that's total of three suicide-related images in a set of fifteen from this little town in China. There is only one image which shows people engaging in anything other than a hostile exchange. But who photographed and made the selections? How representative are they of that society?

I don't know if Norm knew about this, but Guangzhou was in the news over the last day or two because of this report about a pro-democracy activist apparently being beaten to death there. But today, the Guardian contradicts its report, and finds the activist alive and well. And then there's a report by Martin Jacques describing the convulsions going on in China which the photographs seem to bear witness to. Reading this, I am curiously reminded of what's going on in Gaza.....

UPDATE: Norm takes issue, as I knew he would, with my view of what I think is the uniquely strong obsession of South African and Zimbabwean Jewish men with cricket. He asks, why not Australian Jewish men? My view of this has to do with those white southern African Jewish communities existing within a particularly racist system of white domination over a very substantial black majority indigenous society. The situation of Jews relative to the wider white society of Australia was very different, despite the presence of the indigenous Australians; Australian society did not depend on that particular racially determined form of economic organization. Not all Jews are "white" of course, but in those societies they counted as whites, albeit with the sort of ambiguous status I've referred to.

Norm asks this question:

Why, for that matter, is there any call for a special explanation about Jewish men? Must Jewish men have become devoted to cricket for a different set of reasons than, say, Englishmen of various denominations (or none)?

Well, in my case, because I have been so struck by the remarkable uniformity of the passion. Say, like in my case 100% of the men I know of. May well be a totally unrepresentative sample. But it is actually far greater than the number of English non-Jews or any other group that I know of.

My fitness club shares its premises with a cricket club. I am very struck by the huge proportion of Hindu and possibly Muslim boys who come for cricket practice compared with other ethnic groups in London. I suspect that their involvement with cricket has a comparable social/sociological meaning, which I think has to do with alignment with English-influenced home culture in their countries of origin.

However, I hope the post doesn't get too diverted into the sociology of cultural/ethnic determination of sporting affinities. It's really about a wider cluster of issues. But thanks for taking it on, Norm.

The bride and bridegroom had written a booklet for their wedding day which was partly to explain the Jewish marriage ceremony to the non-Jews attending it. Their explanations did much more than that, for they revealed their love for each other and the depth and wisdom of their understanding of what they were committing themselves to.

This is part of what they wrote about the bedeken, the part before the start of the ceremony where the veiling of the bride takes place.

Then, [bridegroom] covers [bride's] face with a veil. This intimate custom can be seen as symbolising that the marriage is not being entered into on the basis of physical attraction alone. It also suggests [bridegroom's] commitment to clothe and protect [bride]

And this is what they wrote about the mysterious circling of the bridegroom by the bride, as she arrives under the chupah (marriage canopy)

[Bride] circles [Bridegroom] seven times, reminding us of the seven days of Creation, and therefore that our union has the power to create whole worlds. This custom also represents the removal of any obstacles between us, and suggests the bride's creation of a protective shield around the groom.

There was more than just the explanations, too. They had decided to hold their wedding in the garden of her parents. Outdoor weddings are of course very common in Israel, but they aren't in England. The garden theme permeated the way they set up the celebration after the marriage. All the guests' tables were labelled with often puzzling names (Drink Me, Letchworth, Graeme, Mr McGregor, Maud) which all turned out to have garden references, but only if your mind, like mine, is littered with the detritus of years of listening to BBC Radio 4's esoteric and cerebral Round Britain Quiz plus a long history of voracious reading.

Both families have expertise in the law and relish the strangenesses of English law as well as those of halacha. There were some delightful notes on why, thanks to an Act of Parliament of 1836, Jews and Quakers can get married in a garden-- or more or less anywhere--but nobody else can, otherwise they will be committing a Felony, unless they have obtained a Special Licence. For halachic strangeness, there was a passing reference to the bridegroom's raising a handkerchief being a halachically recognised demonstration of agreement to the terms of the Jewish kesuboh [marriage contract]. And they mentioned a Talmudic source that said that the Almighty had braided Eve's hair before acting as Adam's best man in the very first wedding of all, in the Garden of Eden.

Quite uniquely, they'd made their two family trees, going back to their sixteen great grandparents, the centre of their booklet, beautifully laid out with their own names at the centre. They invited the guests at the wedding to draw the connecting lines that finally bound the two families together through the marriage. With my own passion for my family history, I was totally charmed. Poignantly, I could see that so many of their great grandparents and grandparents shared my own experience of growing up in the East End of London, albeit up to sixty years earlier. Two great grandparents had been done to death in Belzec, where so many of my own family had shared that fate in the same calamitous year of 1942.

I wasn't at the ceremony. But the words in the booklet and the sight of the pride, joy and love on the faces of bride and groom in the photo already displayed in the Sheva Brochos room were enough. They made me feel that I too shared the spirit and joy, the presence of the ruach hakodesh [the spirit of divine inspiration] of that wonderful day, as surely as if I had been there in person, in a way that no video and no album of wedding photos ever does.

At that Sheva Brochos, I was seated as if it were with the angels. For a bride and her groom take precedence over royalty in the week of their marriage, and in the Jewish tradition, the next step up is.... And for no reason I deserved, I was seated opposite them, with our hostess, the bridegroom's mother, at my right hand. At my left was seated one of the gentlest, kindest, most humane men I know, who I've known for years. His love of learning and his ability to make a whole shul full of people feel he opens the gates of heaven for them are exceeded only by his modesty. I don't often see him, but whenever I do, I always make a point of asking about all his children and his grandchildren. Of course, I am really interested to know how they are. But I also love to see how his face is transfigured with the unselfconscious heartfelt love and joy with which he speaks of them.

He had just got A Tale of Love and Darkness and had not yet started it, so I could enjoy sharing with him my memories of the wonderful experience of reading it. How much it is saturated with Amos Oz' religious education, which he is usually silent about, and what delights awaited him (and if you haven't read it yet, you really should).

With my hostess, I talked about politics, and people thinking you're insane and/or wildly bigoted because you're religious, my experiences of blogging, and the ways of the BBC, and whether what you believe is really what you believe. All of which I too rarely have a chance to talk with her about in real time.

But this was after all the Sheva Brochos for the young bride and bridegroom at our table. And in their charm, their quiet delight, their togetherness and their sweet deference to each other, I saw what was there in the words they had chosen for each other as they had come to the chupah the previous day.

For him, the words that were sung were

My beloved is red-cheeked and radiant, remarkable amongst men.

His head shines like the finest gold and is crowned with black locks.

(Song of Songs 5:10-11)

For her, the words included

Who is this woman that comes out of the wilderness? You have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride.

(Song of Songs 3:6, 4:9)

Towards the end of the Sheva Brochos, the bridegroom's mother spoke. She spoke of the wonderful experience of becoming the mother in law of such a young woman as the bride, and of becoming part of her extended family. In our conversations, we had spoken of the deep significance of the difference between the traditional English/Christian term "mother in law" and the Hebrew/Yiddish word for the in law family, which is "mechutanim", which means the married-to or married-into ones. For our tradition sees that as a relationship truly ties two families and their histories into as strong a bond as the marriage itself. It is so much more than just "in law". There are no traditional Jewish jokes about mothers-in-law, which are the stock-in-trade of traditional English male comedians. But there is a huge corpus of mechutanista jokes, which are about the relationship between the two mothers, a relationship concept unknown to the English/Christian tradition.

But I will finish, as I should with the bride and the groom. My heart was touched as I saw the bridegroom brushing away the tears that almost slipped out of his eyes as his mother spoke, and she wept as she read her closing joyful words. His face shone, indeed like gold, as he spoke of his pride and delight at having got to the stage of having been married for thirty hours. And the bride smiled with quiet pleasure. She did not feel the need to speak, for the words she had chosen for her own special moment in the ceremony spoke so clearly for her.

I said in my previous post that I am down the line Orthodox in matters of Jewish marriage, and do not agree with altering the rites for this group or that sensibility. But these young people had something to teach me about what can be acceptably added. This is how they explained what the bride added when she placed a ring on the finger of the bridegroom in the moments after he had said the declaration with the ring which married them in Jewish law:

The Talmud makes it clear that the bride needs only to show her assent to the betrothal by willingly accepting the groom's ring. However as a lawyer, [Bride] knows that silence may not be taken as indicating consent! This modern addition to the ceremony takes place, therefore, "for the avoidance of doubt".

And these are the magnificent and powerful words which the bride spoke, which are from the Book of Hosea, which stand as the truest and most beautiful statement I have seen of what a pledge to a lifetime love partnership should be:

I will betroth you to me for ever;

I will betroth you to me in righteousness, and in justice, and in lovingkindness, and in compassion.

i will betroth you to me in faithfulness.

Dear loved companions, all of you, thank you for inviting me and honouring me in sharing your Sheva Brochos with me. Dear bride and bridegroom, may this first Shabbos be the first of a lifetime of joyful ones for you. And may every day bring the proof of the truth of your vows.

On Monday night, I was at a Sheva Brochos. Well, actually, they called it a Sheva Brachot, which is the Sephardi/Modern Hebrew/Israeli pronunciation. In religious matters, however, I stick to the Yiddish sounding Ashkenazi Hebrew of my childhood. To do this marks me off as more Orthodox than the mainstream Orthodox. But actually, it's all about what's closest to my heart. And in religious practice terms, that's the memories of my childhood in Yiddish speaking Jewish Stepney. In case any of you want to write in and pick up some of my inconsistencies in this matter, you don't need to bother. I know I'm not consistent. This is not about rationality.

A Sheva Brochos is a beautiful event. In the week following a traditional Orthodox Jewish wedding, there is a series of festive meals held each night in honour of the newlyweds. They may be given by the parents, relatives or friends. The idea is to involve an ever widening community in celebrating and blessing the union of the couple. It is considered meritorious to fill whatever room they are held in with as many people as it can possibly hold. And it is even more meritorious to invite increasing numbers of new people every night, so that that as the week goes by the circle of who is the new couple's community spreads wider and wider.

The words "Sheva Brochos" refer to the seven blessings for a marriage, which are sung and chanted as a key part of the wedding ceremony. All the blessings, and the words that precede them, are beautiful. Those I love best include these wonderful visions of what love, the love of the community of couples, companions and the youth on our streets might be:

O make these loved companions greatly to rejoice, even as of old thou didst gladden thy creatures in the Garden of Eden......

...who hast created joy and gladness, bridegroom and bride, mirth and exultation, pleasure and delight, love, brotherhood, peace and fellowship.

Soon...may there be heard in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the jubilant voices of bridegrooms from their canopies, and of youths from their feasts of song....

And in the spirit of the Sheva Brochos, it is considered meritorious for each blessing to be chanted by a different man. It is a great honour for each man who is asked, so the circles of honouring as well as celebrating, are spread wider and wider throughout the week. As each blessings is said, the ceremonial wine becher is passed by the guests across the room from the one man to the next, as everyone quietly sings a poignant and lyrical traditional Jewish niggun, the lei-lei-lei-lei-lei of devotional folk melodies. in a small room full of forty or more people, that's a truly magical sound.

And of course I am always aware as a woman with her own perspective on these matters that it leaves the women free to run the show, as they usually do, and focus the men on getting the bit they have to do right. The mathematical amongst you may have noticed that this results in a total of forty nine blessings being made over the newlyweds. Actually, the Sheva Brochos should be said at the two main meals of each day, so the real total of blessings if you really want to do it right is ninety-eight. Which is exactly enough to counter the ninety-eight spine-chilling curses which the Jewish people is warned will be visited on them if they abandon the laws of Torah, and which will be read in our synagogues this coming Shabbos.

The funny thing is, this is only the second or third Sheva Brochos I've ever been to. They are beginning to be held in England now by mainstream Orthodox couples and families, in many cases those where one or other of the children has spent at least a year studying in sem or yeshiva in Israel, as my daughter is doing now. Or they have been involved in the UK's electrifying annual Jewish informal learning conference "Limmud", where, like so many British Jewish couples these days, the bride and bridegroom had met.

In my childhood and youth, no-one in the mainstream Orthodox Jewish circles I grew up in or knew of did them. Jewish weddings in England were strange, grand occasions, where relatively humble tailors, sewing machinists and accountants got dressed up and appeared in the middle of the afternoon in top hats and morning coats or mink stoles and brocaded evening dress to eat one big seven course meal. There were always free cigarettes put out on the table. There would be dancing to a shrunk down version of the Joe Loss Band. And there would be a series of speeches and toasts presided over by a booming character dressed up in a red cutaway coat like some escapee from the Quantock Hunt who would bawl out things like, Ladies and gentlemen, kindly be upstanding for her Majesty the Queen!

(The wedding of my first cousin Greta to Arnold in June 1961. That's me aged seventeen going on forty five up on the steps to the left above the groom's parents, complete with big hair, a ton and a half of make-up and a specially made up matronly outfit)

The English Jewish community of those days was still immersed in the project of comically trying to adopt what they imagined were the ways of the English upper classes.

(The table for our circle of grown-ups at Greta's wedding, who all came to England as refugees from Nazi Berlin circa 1939. Except for Cousin Max from Amsterdam, next to my mother behind the fruit basket, who was one of only two cousins who survived Auschwitz. He was the first person who told me, aged 14, about the orchestra of Auschwitz that played as he was marched to work, and who showed me the number on his arm. My father sits on my mother's other side, his face betraying his distaste for English-Jewish style assimilationism and having to dress up in a dinner jacket)

And its Israeli counterpart was equally immersed in the project of demonstrating that Judaism was redundant now that they had returned to Israel. In fact, if you had asked most Israeli Jews of that type what they thought about Jewish weddings, they would have told you how important it was to stop Orthodox Jewish marriage rites being forced on the Jews of Israel, and how you could go and have a civil marriage ceremony in a register office in Cyprus to avoid this happening to you.

But to the many people who doubt that the Jewish community of Britain has a future (and there are some comments to that effect on this post), I give you the beautiful young couple for whom Monday's Sheva Brochos was held. For unlike the Jewish couples of the forties and fifties, these two loved companions had not done the usual thing of leaving the planning in the hands of the mother of the bride. They had created a setting and a way of doing the ceremony and the Sheva Brochos that was totally traditional and halachically [Jewishly legally] in order. Yet they had also created something electrically new, drawn from the vast wisdom of the Jewish sources.

Now, I need to make my own position clear here. I am down the line Orthodox on Jewish marriage. I don't believe in taking out any little bits people might find awkward or even unacceptable. It's for the same reason that I couldn't stand the eighteenth and nineteenth century intellectuals who tried to improve Shakespeare by altering the unhappy endings. And I don't believe Jewish marriage is for any but Jews in combinations of eligible-to-marry men and women. Because if you read the Jewish marriage contract, it's no recipe for equality. All the obligations are on the man who should be someone who has experienced what it means to deliver what it says about caring for your wife after the manner of Jewish husbands. It seems very well designed to cater for the social realities of men and women who contemplate lifelong partnership. There. I've said it. I always knew that if you start a blog, whatever you write, you won't please everybody. And now I probably have got to the position where I won't please anybody.

So in my next post, I'll tell you exactly what they did. And what it was like to experience that Sheva Brochos.